Abstract

We conducted a combined anion photoelectron spectroscopy and density functional theory study on V2Si20 cluster. Our results show that the V2Si20 cluster has an elongated dodecahedron cage structure with a V2 unit encapsulated inside the cage. It is the smallest fullerene-like silicon cage and can be used as building block to make cluster-assembled materials, such as pearl-chain style nanowires.

W.-J.Z. acknowledges the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. KJCX2-EW-H01) for finance support. H.-G.X. acknowledges the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 21103202) for finance support. The theoretical calculations were conducted on the ScGrid and Deepcomp7000 of the Supercomputing Center, Computer Network Information Center of Chinese Academy of Sciences.